1. Technical Field
Example embodiments relate to an application processor and a computing system including the application processor.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, an application processor includes peripheral devices such as an image processor, a three dimensional graphic processor, a movie encoder, a movie decoder, etc., to reduce burden of a central processing unit (CPU) in processing multimedia data. The peripheral devices perform a direct memory access (DMA) operation on a system memory in which the peripheral devices directly write data to the system memory and directly read data from the system memory without intervention of the central processing unit.
Conventionally, the peripheral devices included in an application processor access a physical memory (i.e., the system memory) using a physical address of the physical memory. As a size of multimedia data increases, a size of continuous memory that is required for the DMA operation increases, so that it is hard for the peripheral devices to get a large size of continuous physical memory during operation.
Therefore, peripheral devices included in a recent application processor includes a memory management unit (MMU) that translates continuous virtual addresses into physical addresses using a page table and accesses the physical memory using the translated physical addresses. As such, a large size of continuous physical memory is no longer required for the DMA operation.
However, since each peripheral device includes a MMU, a plurality of page tables, which correspond to the peripheral devices, respectively, are stored in the system memory, so that memory consumption increases.